Home technology management is emerging as the second great digital convergent integration challenge, after the telecommunication industry. Both industries have undergone significant introduction of new services both in emerging digital products and also in enhancements to traditional technologies. Standards have evolved for formats and general use in these convergent markets to facilitate market uptake. However, techniques for managing the configuration, the interaction and the overall complexity of these services are limited. These techniques are not core competency of the major providers and in fact it may not be in their best interest to make other providers products easy to integrate. This business reality has plagued the telecommunication market for 20 years and has produced a multi-billion telecommunication management integration industry.
In the Home Automation market, managing the growing number of intelligent products has been mostly on an individual basis using simple universal remote solutions or very expensive custom integrations services. In all cases, the addition off a new service complicates, if not antiquates, these existing integration methods.
While, the introduction of the computer into the home services mix should alleviate the situation, the standard Home PC is not really equipped for broad integration as it does not naturally interface to non IP products well. Most households that today have a home network, in fact do not do inter home computer communication, but only provide access to the outside internet. The new Media Center class of computer is more focused on supplanting other services, mostly entertainment, and interfaces to other home technologies are limited and mostly hobbyist activity. There is utilization of computer technology in some newer home automation platforms. However, these products follow the component productization model and the true flexibility of the computer is lost.
What is required is the interjection of advanced computer and data architecture into the home market, designed primarily for an intuitive and extendable user experience. This design will provide the user with a Single Learning Curve for all the manageable features in, and addressable from their home, by applying ridged data management processes coupled with a extensible and flexible hardware and software framework to produce a home automation environment that intuitively manages a wide variety of digital appliances, automation and audio video components present in the market today. More importantly the architecture is easily adaptable to new home devices and communication technologies both internal and external.